The Healing Power of Travel

Once, when I was living in New York and in the kind of deep funk that can only result from a broken heart, I vowed to try to do or see something new every day. It wasn’t hard (logistically, that is). I would eat at a new restaurant, walk down a new street, ride a different train, visit a new museum or take part in some random activity you can only do in New York. After a short time, the funk abated. I scarcely noticed it even happened, I was so enthralled with the city.

I know I’m not alone when I say that for me, travel is healing.

If I’m stressed out, the last thing I want to do is fit a doctor’s appointment into my day, sit in a waiting room, then pay a health system hundreds of dollars so someone will prescribe something. Instead, the first thing I want to do is plant my feet on new soils.

Nothing is more life-giving to me than setting my eyes upon sites I’ve never seen before, tasting foods I’ve never tasted, meeting new people with new life experiences. It’s expansion, rather than atrophy. It shifts the camera for me. And, it stops that anxious little hamster in my brain from running, running, running on that same wheel of thought.

In travel, I’m moving toward something: The World.

It’s such an amazing place; I can’t fathom how so many people manage to stay so still.

Charish Badzinski is an explorer, foodie and award-winning travel and food writer. When she isn’t working to build her blog: Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World, she applies her worldview to her small business, providing strategic communications, media relations and writing support to individuals and organizations.